With the Republican Party’s establishment and tea party wings busy attacking each other, and no standard-bearer emerging for the White House, a group of intellectuals calling themselves “reform conservatives” are maneuvering to seize the party’s 2016 policy agenda.

In the process, they’ve set off a lively, intensifying debate in recent weeks over whether today’s GOP can be reformed at all.

The policy wonks — led by thinkers including Peter Wehner, Yuval Levin, and Ramesh Ponnuru — are circulating their economics-focused ideas with the express goal of influencing 2016 presidential contenders, and some of those potential candidates have been cautiously receptive. Rep. Paul Ryan, for instance, tweeted that their proposals are “good food for thought;” Sen. Marco Rubio’s spokeswoman said he believes the ideas “can ensure that the next generation of Americans have more opportunities for success”; and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence told POLITICO that he has “great appreciation for the efforts of reform minded conservatives.”

The reformers say they want to move the GOP beyond its Reagan-era script of cutting taxes and shrinking government and toward a focus on what a more limited government can and should do, especially for the middle class. For the most part, they’ve shopped their ideas around informally, through private conversations and journal articles. But recently they took a more organized approach, releasing a 121-page policy manifesto called “Room to Grow.”

That move dramatically raised their profiles — and drew out the skeptics.

Conservative columnist Michael Gerson has praised the group, arguing it has “more potential influence” than the tea party. But liberal critics, such as columnists E.J. Dionne and Jonathan Chait, have questioned how effective the reformists can be at a time when the Republican Party has expunged many of its moderates and the base is animated by the notion that government is always a problem. Some observers, meanwhile, compare them to the New Democrats of the 1990s, a parallel the intellectuals resist.

The reform conservatives argue there’s no need to lure the GOP to the middle and no desire to further splinter it. (They’re not even sure who came up with their group’s label, though Gerson has used the phrase, or a version of it, for at least two years.) If anything, they say, their ideas would “reform” broken institutions by pushing them to the right.

“It is a conservative movement, and it’s important to understand that,” said Wehner, a former policy adviser to ex-President George W. Bush. “It’s not a fight. It’s not Goldwater vs. Rockefeller.”

The e-book manifesto, released in May at an event sponsored by the YG Network and the American Enterprise Institute, lays out proposals from around a dozen authors on 10 wide-ranging issues, including replacing Obamacare, helping the long-term unemployed, and rewriting War on Poverty programs.

It avoids divisive cultural issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, steering a careful path around anything that could offend social conservatives. But it does include this implied challenge to the tea party: “Rather than talk about conservatism exclusively as a set of rules about what government should not be doing, we need to help Americans see the conservative vision of American life as a way to unleash the nation’s potential.”

Some critical details are still being worked out, like how to pay for some of the ideas. A chapter on tax reform, for example, talks up Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s proposal to give families an extra $2,500 tax credit per child and advertises it as a way to help parents struggling with the cost of raising kids. But an analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that Lee’s idea would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.

The reform conservatives note that the ideas are mere blueprints for now. The main point, they say, is to show how conservative proposals can be turned into policies to help the middle class, not just recycled into the usual talking points about cutting taxes and slashing spending.

“Middle class families aren’t worried about their tax burden,” said Reihan Salam, a policy adviser at the YG Network and contributing editor at National Review. “They’re worried about how much it costs to own and operate a car. They’re worried about finding decent post-secondary [education] options.”

Levin, who edits the conservative journal National Affairs, put it more bluntly: “The left always thinks it’s 1965. The right always thinks it’s 1981. The country knows it’s 2014.”

There’s already some overlap between the reform conservatives’ ideas and those of some possible 2016-ers, especially Ryan and Rubio. A chapter on rewriting social safety net programs, for example, promotes ideas Ryan and Rubio have used in recent speeches, such as Rubio’s proposal to consolidate low-income social programs into a “flex fund” for the states and Ryan’s idea of merging them into a “universal credit” sent directly to families.

Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, says 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made a crucial error when he blamed his loss on President Barack Obama offering “gifts” to young adults, minorities and other Democratic voters. Republicans need to offer benefits to voters that will improve their standards of living, he said, to balance the entitlement reforms the GOP says it wants.

“We need to find conservative ideas that make people better off, and then sell them on that basis,” Ponnuru said. “What have we been offering to people in recent elections on a tangible basis? Not a lot.”

Unlike the Democratic Leadership Council and its think tank arm, the Progressive Policy Institute — which had a clear goal of pulling the Democrats to the center in the 1990s — the reform conservatives say they’re not trying to turn the GOP more moderate, but simply to find a way for it to compete with Democrats on topics largely ceded to the left, especially health care.

But others do see parallels to the 1990s Democratic reformers, including PPI President Will Marshall, who has been following the reform conservatives’ ideas closely.

“There’s no question that they’re trying to get the Republican Party to pick up some of the issues they’ve abandoned,” Marshall said. “Clearly, the big idea is getting the Republican Party to come to terms with government.”

Skeptics argue that to get any real traction within the GOP, reform conservatives have to convince the base — which is rife with anti-government sentiment — that there’s actually a need to spell out a role for government at all, even a more limited one.

Dionne argues that the current batch of reformers are “limited by an increasingly conservative Republican primary electorate, the shift in the GOP’s geographical center of gravity toward the South, and a rightward drift within the business community.”

Other critics say the reform conservatives are avoiding key issues — Vox’s Matthew Yglesias notes they haven’t talked about climate change, for instance. And The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall says the reformers’ biggest problem is that “to prove their case, they need their party to fail.”

While there were plenty of moderates in the Democratic Party base who could give grassroots support to the New Democrats back in the 1990s, Marshall said, the reform conservatives’ problem is that “radicalism bubbles up from the grassroots … The tea party is not a mirage.”

Tea party leaders did not offer an immediate response to requests for comment on the group, but it’s clear that reform conservatives are careful in their discussion of the grassroots movement, which, despite struggles defeating establishment GOP candidates this year, has succeeded in pushing the party further right.

“They have a certain tone and tactical approach which can be problematic, as we saw in (last fall’s) government shutdown,” Wehner said of the tea party activists. “But I don’t think they would object to the ideas in the book.”

Al From, the founder of the DLC, said another important difference is that the now-defunct Democratic organization didn’t just have position papers — it had elected officials throughout the country who could give support to its ideas and join the fight against establishment liberals.

“You’ve got to have a cadre of political leaders who are willing to fall on their sword for it,” From said.

Nothing like that is in the cards for reform conservatives just yet, despite the cautious praise they’ve received from Ryanand others. Instead, reform conservatives say they’d be satisfied just to have the GOP quietly adopt their ideas so the party will have more to say to middle-class voters.

“They’re not brand new ideas in the sense that nobody’s ever heard of them before,” Levin said. “But they’ve never been the agenda of the Republican Party before, and I think something like these ideas ought to be.”